In our preceding Blog post we mentioned Andrea Camilleri and, wandering around YouTube, we came across this BBC documentary dedicated to the history of Italian crime fiction. The documentary examines works by, of course, Andrea Camilleri, by two great authors of Italian literature, now passed away, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Leonardo Sciascia, by Giancarlo De Cataldo, author of Romanzo criminale, by Barbara Baraldi, Massimo Carlotto and by Carlo Lucatelli, and is very interesting.

Talking about Leonardo Sciascia, for those who are not familiar with him, we've uploaded, in Pdf format, an excellent essay written by Verina Jones dedicated to Sciascia, published in a very interesting 1984 book: Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy: A Collection of Essays, edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth. The book, available at Amazon, contains, apart from a concise history of Italy from the post-war years to the 80's, essays dedicated to the avant-garde Italian literary movement of the 60's, to Umberto Eco, Franco Fortini, Andrea Zanzotto, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dario Fo, Dino Buzzati, Elsa Morante, and to Italo Calvino.

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At Italia 500 we've been offering Italian courses, in Sydney, since 1995 and one of the most beautiful aspects of learning Italian is that it opens the door to a culture of unrivalled richness and diversity. In this blog we'll be sharing some of our favourite books, movies, places in Italy to visit, music, links to podcasts, information about local and international Italian themed events, and the odd "personal" view, in the hope that it will encourage you to delve further into a culture which continues to inspire us and millions of people all over the world.